CAN-SPAM One Year Later? 40
BigPoppaT asks: "Computerworld has an article reviewing the effectiveness of CAN-SPAM one year after it passed. In the article several anti-spam companies cite spam as a huge (and increasing) percentage of the total e-mail load. Most state that it is more than 50%, and some are saying as much as 75%. (This matches what I see in other articles on the subject.) Are these figures reasonable? I do not work for an ISP or maintain a mail server, but speaking as an end-user, I do not have anywhere near this much spam - more like 5 to 10 items a week (out of a few hundred messages). This is in my personal email - I do not recall ever receiving any spam in my work inbox. If the numbers above are reasonable, I wonder why I get so little spam? I am on a number of mailing lists, and have purchased things online, so it is not as if I have gone too far out of the way to hide my email address. I am not complaining, mind you, I just think it would be useful for the Slashdot readers who deal with this in an administrative capacity to explain it to the rest of us. Are the spam numbers being inflated by these anti-spam groups as a marketing tool? (This is not a rhetorical question - I really am not in a position to evaluate this, so those who know, please fill the rest of us in.)"
Users and their Spam (Score:1)
75 % accurate (Score:4, Interesting)
By playing around with permutations of my email address, I find that a large chunk comes from infected colleagues' and students' computers. Relatively little comes from web crawlers. I also get a burst at around 8:00-8:15 when the staff members turn their machines on, and another burst a little later as faculty drift in. During the holidays, the rate goes way down.
Re:75 % accurate (Score:2)
I'd just like to add my own stats to the discussion: my 'signal-to-noise' ratio is pretty low too, about 1:20. what does that work out to? uhhhhhh... I can't do math right now. 95% -- that sounds about right. Ninety-five percent spam.
I notice that the vast majority of it appears during the night time, so I receive it when I turn my computer on in the morning. Maybe it's because I'm on the west coast, and all the security-unconscious computer users on the eastern seaboard (and the rest of the continent) tur
oop (Score:2)
Admins and generic addresses get it worst (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever registered a domain? Nearly all the spam I get is to an address I only use for registering domains. I'm careful with my primary addresses, and receive nearly nothing on them.
A lot of spam that hits the system you'll never see as well. A big chunk of spam lists have bad or nonexistent addresses in them. There's usually some poor schmuck (here, that's me) that has to check and see if an Important Business Contact just can't type, or if all those emails to betty1@example.com, betty2@example.com, etc. are aimed at insecure men.
Other popular targets for spam are sales@, info@, support@....etc. so unless you're responsible for one of those, that's more spam you won't see.
Lucky bastard.
Re:Admins and generic addresses get it worst (Score:1)
(Given the volumes everyone is talking about here, I'm not too excited about actually putting those addresses here!)
I have another email address that I use for the various mailing lists, and don't get any spam there. I have a Yahoo account fo
Re:Admins and generic addresses get it worst (Score:2)
Fortunately, I'm not in that league yet, although I've noted a dramatic increase in the last few months. I'm more in the 300 a week category, but at the rate things are going...Thunderbird is doing a pretty good job nailing spam for me. It's catching around 80% currently, and I haven't had a false positive yet.
One thing you might want to consider for posting email addresses on your site is to encode it with javascript. It's not guaranteed (if a browser can decode it, a harvester can), but it significant
Re:Admins and generic addresses get it worst (Score:2)
Spam levels vary widely (Score:2)
PGP signing (Score:2)
Anyone else noticed t
Accurate figures (Score:3, Insightful)
You may have successfully protected your email address and have ordered from businesses with some degree of integrity. You may also have a spam filter in place somewhere.
Maybe not inflated, but certainly skewed (Score:2)
some get it, other don't (Score:1)
I rarely get spam, whereas my workmates get an average of 100 spams a week
Alot of spam.. (Score:1)
Training spam filters are taking some time.
anecdotes != data... (Score:2)
domain name registrations
online fora and blog comments
usenet
Yeah, I leave my real e-mail address in all of those places. I used to be more careful, but SpamBayes is so good, spam just isn't a problem for me.
Numbers are accurate. (Score:1)
I get, on average, 300 emails per day, Over 250 of which are spam. Spam-assassin catches maybe 90% of those.
You probably have filters at the ISP level (Score:2)
My ratio (Score:1)
We receive between 60k-80k messages a day into our company and of that, about 90% is spam.
I have found the people who get most of the spam are those who have their addresses in other people's address books. I think that spammers get lists of emails gathered by viruses that collect address books.
Of course my boss is the worst because his email is set up as the billing email for all of our domains. The benefit of this is I have
Time to amend CAN-SPAM (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Time to amend CAN-SPAM (Score:2)
Some concordance between laws internationally, and an ability for prosecutions to cross borders would be a stunning step, IMO.
Re:Time to amend CAN-SPAM (Score:1)
Yup, it's that bad (Score:3, Informative)
Our SpamAssassin server correctly detects over 99% of the spam, and rejects about 92% of it outright at our Internet gateway. The 8% least-spammy-looking-spam is tagged and allowed through to allow for false positives, though none have yet been reported.
Public Email Addresses (Score:2)
Due to this, I and the department editors that work for me (as well as the advertising and circulation departments) receive hundreds of spam messages daily.
I eliminate mo
There are currently... (Score:3, Informative)
So I get roughly 100 spams per day, of which gmail will let one, maybe two through every fifth day or so. pretty good. I now use my gmail account pretty much exclusively.
Thinking back, my spam volumes appear to have gone UP since CAN-SPAM went into effect. As for my work address, 3 a day or so, but we run a lot of spam filtering here, and I don't have access to the figures blocked. I've certainly not seen any marked effect of recent legislation on the amount of crap I get in my inbox.
75% Accurate (Score:2)
Yes, spam volume really is that bad.
Re:75% Accurate (Score:1)
Blocked 267,219
Blocked: Virus 298
Quarantined 20,993
Allowed: Tagged 6,364
Allowed 98,868
Total Received 393,742
Which works out to 74.9% spam. One thing that throws these statistics for a loop is, we use an external traffic filter (IPS unit). That box knocks down most virus laden emails, as well as a lot of types of ph
perspective (Score:2)
maybe you just don't see it (Score:2)
Some plots (Score:2)
To get a rough idea of trends, I've been plotting stats on a mailserver I manage. In general, we see spam and viruses are increasing, while ham is decreasi [uiuc.edu]
Some Figures (Score:1)
False positives are the new new problem (Score:1)
With the dramatic improvements in spam filtering software, getting rid of spam is no longer the technical problem it once was. In my experience as a consultant to email administrators and as a market research in the messaging industry, other, derivative problems are now taking over. And these problems are the result of filtering.
There are several problems that now plague email administrators: 1) satisfying the vast resource requirements of a modern email filtering system, 2) handling an increased flow of
ASSP stats (Score:1)
I used to get 50-100 spams per day; now almost 0. (Score:1, Informative)
Thanks to MS-Outlook worms, even internal corporate email lists started receiving some really offensive porno-spam.
Today I get only a few spams per month, but to achieve this I ended up abandoning my old domain and setting up a system of aliases whereby I give a different email address to every person or organization that asks me for one. I now have several
Not an exaggeration (Score:1)
Admittedly, this is only my particular case. However...
In January 2004, I received roughly 1,020 spams. Last month (December 2004), I received over 3300 spams. And the number has not decreased in any month since March 2004.
Effective law, my a**.
Sources of spam (Score:1)
http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/ [spamhaus.org]
We have unique WHOIS addresses and a lot of the spam comes from here but also from website scraping.
You can also see the source of SPAM migrate around the world, as new lists are produced and the old ones sold on. Our oldest unique addresses now receive almost all their SPAM from Asia in non English Languages.
75% seems a little low to me (Score:1)